Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy

  • Do your customers know that “you” exist?

    In one of my previous posts, I had talked about educating customers on all the different product enhancements you have made to solve their problems. But there is another problem that needs customer education. The phone conversation goes: Product Manager: “Mr. Customer, I am the product Manager from company X.”…

  • Two questions software product managers must always ask

    1) “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” Ask the internal stakeholders who are pitching new ideas to you, ask this of customers who are asking for new features and repeatedly ask yourself to make sure you are not deviating from it as you are getting caught up…

  • Do your customers know?

    How often have your customers asked you for functionality that you already have in your product – functionality you have had in the product for a year or two? I have had this happen often enough in my career. There are two causes for this 1) You forgot to tell…

  • Messenger of problems?

    It is very easy to identify problems. What is difficult is figuring out how to solve them? Ones who do the latter are valued and get ahead. Sounds like cliche? Absolutely. But it still surprises me when I run into “messengers” of problems. Many want to bring a slew of…

  • Futility of “feature wars”

    If you as a software product manager is arming your sales force with detailed information on all of the features in your product(s), you are arming them with information to fail. If your sales team is engaging in a “feature war” with your competitors, you are bound to lose to…

  • How organizations can get caught napping …

    If you the product manager is thinking: 1) We are the market leaders and the well known brand and we set the tone in this market or 2) I fully understand the market segment that will be interested in buying this product or 3) We have the marketing muscle to…

  • Understand why your customers buy

    I had written a previous post on making it easy for customers to buy your product. If your pricing structure is complex, a customer who was about to hand over the money to you is going to walk away. I call this the “last mile problem” in selling a product.…

  • Businesses are not ready for social media, unless ….

    By now, you all have heard enough about social media this, social media that – folks in your office saying we need to create a business account on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the other zillion social media sites out there. But are businesses ready for this. My answer is No.…

  • Understand the reason for the madness, before you imitate it

    Have you had the instance where someone in your product development team says during a product discussion – make it like the Google home page, or make it work like Amazon does it, or see how well IBM’s website does it. If they are doing it, they should be right.…

  • Become a software product manager only if …..

    Here is a question I received the other day – “I am a business analyst now in product management team and my boss identified me as a candidate for Product management. I am excited about the opportunity, but don’t want to accept something just t0 fail. Can you please answer…

  • How much customer “capital” have you earned?

    As a software product manager, there is nothing more valuable than having concrete information about the market – customers, competitors, partners – all folks that influence the “external” world outside your office building. No one inside your office is buying your product, but then why do we make a lot…

  • How wired is your product?

    You have a great product, you have a large customer base. Awesome! But how tuned in are you to how your user base is using your product? How wired is your product? Web products can get you good deal of information such as page views, number of unique visitors, how…

  • 5 Suggestions product managers can adopt during the New Year

    Here are 5 suggestions that I recommend product managers adopt during the New Year. 1) Be “market” and not “marketing” driven – Talk to as many customers as possible in understanding their business, why they use your company’s products, what they like about it and what they don’t like about…

  • 7 questions software product managers must ask during a job interview

    I was asked by Jeff Lash to answer a question for his blog on what questions a product manager could ask during a job interview to better understand the role of product management in the company. Here are my recommendations – 1) Why are you hiring a software product manager?…

  • Two words that will make you and your business better

    THANK YOU! We all are busy, we have all those emails to read, all those meetings to attend, all those conference calls we have to be on. We don’t have time. But, keep in mind that we have the same 24 hours that Albert Einstein had, Madam Curie had, Mahatma…

  • Cross selling to existing customers

    This morning, I had to get an oil change and I drove up to the local Jiffy Lube. They charge $35 for an oil change. When I pulled in, they pulled up my car record and based on the mileage, they told me about the Honda recommended maintenance I have to…

  • Secrets of success in 8 words and 3 minutes

    Wondering about how to be successful – watch this video by Richard St. John delivered at Ted 2007.

  • Twitter 101 – 8 tips to get started on Twitter

    Over the past couple of weeks, I have been asked by many folks how to get started on Twitter. I have had to give them the Twitter 101 to help them get started and hence I think it is worthy of a post. But before I recommend on how to…

  • Yes, it is a piece of cake, but ….

    It is quite common for people to say that doing something is a piece of cake. It is very easy to say this especially if you are not the one doing it. I have personally heard this many times from my upper management – “oh, that should be so simple…

  • Did Mumbai graduate”Twitter” to mainstream?

    Last Wednesday, Mumbai experienced one of the worst terrorist attacks (if not the worst) seen by India since its independence in 1947. 200 people were killed and over 325 were injured in the 60 hour carnage carried out by Islamic terrorists, with nexus to Pakistan’s ISI. The country and the…

  • How “Human” is your business?

    One of the wrong arguments you hear from businesses is “… but we are a B2B company and not a consumer company – so it cannot work for us”. But they forget that customer interactions in a B2B company are still between people. You are dealing with a purchasing manager,…

  • Make your products easy to buy

    If your company sells products in different tiers (Basic, Professional, Premium etc.) how easy is it for your prospects to understand the difference in the tiers both in terms of functionality and price? If you put on the hat of a prospect, how easy will it be for you to…

  • Five reasons why analyst reports will become extinct

    Research analyst groups such as Forrester, Gartner, Yankee Group, Aberdeen and others that publish the various industry reports and sell them to customers and vendors should be really worried about this part of their business. Here are the five reasons why? 1) Analysts sell expensive, static and hence quickly outdated content –…

  • 5 lessons for software product managers from the Obama campaign

    Here are five lessons that I as a software product manager took away from the presidential election campaign run by Barack Obama. Your party affiliations may vary, but I hope you will agree with these five takeaways. 1) It is the “economy” stupid – There may be a 100 things…

  • Radio station needs your fund raising ideas

    Product managers and others, here is an opportunity to get creative. A well known radio station here in Boston is looking for your help in coming up with some creative ideas on how they can do fund raising. Currently, they do this via their broadcast, but unfortunately this results in…

  • Audience, GPS, Monkey – Three powerpoint presentation tips

    I have written many prior posts on presentation skills and how not to use Powerpoint. I was recently asked to guest blog on Chris Brogan’s website. I decided to do this via a 6 min video. BTW, Chris Brogan is the most social media savvy and super-friendly person I have…

  • 5 ways software product managers can listen to the market without a travel budget

    Times are tough, budgets are being cut, there is no travel money to visit customers. Oh no, the sky is falling, how am I as a product manager going to listen to the market or get customer input on some of our ideas? This is the time to become even…

  • Managing products in an economic downturn – Part 2

    Here are couple more ways how you could manage products in an economic downturn. This assumes that you have enough cash in the bank to stay in business in the midst of slow sales. 1) Can your product help customers do things in a new way: Can your product help…

  • Managing products in an economic downturn – Part 1

    Currently, we are in a global recession (Yes I am tired of hearing it is coming, for all practical purposes we are in one). Pundits predict this to last a while since we are breaking new grounds with the global financial crisis, two wars, new President and the interlinking of…

  • 5 ways software product managers can develop their personal brand

    We as software product managers spend a lot of time figuring out positioning statements for our products to ensure that the product brand will stick. But how about our own personal brand? Have you ever thought about your own state? After all are you not a product? – what about…

  • Why did Facebook and Google forget their users?

    Recently Facebook did a major UI upgrade that caused an uproar in the user community. People screamed because the new Facebook UI was just awful and made the user experience terrible. Google last week brought out the new iGoogle UI and it is awful. To make matters worse, they did…

  • Demo candy may not be sweet after all

    Hey, it is Halloween time, so let us talk about some candies. Heard the term “demo candy”? – almost all of you probably have. Features that are thrown into a product because it appeals to the emotions of the buyer but basically a feature of less practical value. But there…

  • Biogen CEO James Mullen forgets to be human

    This post has nothing to do with product management. Andrew Baron, founder of RocketBoom reported yesterday that his father Frederick Baron, is dying of multiple myeloma, a particularly nasty form of cancer. Last week doctors gave him days to live – as of this morning he’s still fighting.Sad story indeed…

  • Product Review – Webnotes

    I came across a cool little product called Webnotes couple of weeks back. It initially caught my attention when I saw it at the Web Innovator’s group meeting a few months back. Webnotes is a startup based in Cambridge, MA. Basically, it allows you to annotate any web page using…

  • 5 tips to building a successful user community

    If you as a product manager would like to build a user community that will self sustain, here are some tips based on my experience building the foundations of a user community on 3D ContentCentral website that currently has close to 450,000 registered members. 1) What is in it for…

  • Taming the Powerpoint Monster

    Powerpoint is killing presentations. Speakers are happy – because they put everything they want to say on their slides and they are assured that they will never forget anything or make a fool of themselves. Alas, the audience is being tortured. I have been a big proponent of using Powerpoint…

  • WBUR/NPR is not “On point”

    I listen to WBUR/NPR every day on my 50 min drive to/from work. I listen to the BBC World news (and it really is world news) at 9am and to OnPoint with Ashbrook at 7pm. At last, I had found one radio station that I looked forward to listening to…

  • It is all about the “right” metric

    Remember the old adage – You cannot manage what you cannot measure. As product managers, we have to measure revenues, number of licenses, performance of our products and a slew of other things. It is not that we don’t measure, but unfortunately, we measure using the wrong metric. Let us…

  • Customer’s Wants vs. Needs

    A customer’s wants vs. needs – This subject has been part of numerous conversations I have had in my working life. Every time I go to India on vacation to visit my family, I always think about this topic. I come back from these trips thankful of what I have…

  • Need a head and a date

    As product managers, we have to work with a lot of departments – engineering, qa, order admin, finance, shipping etc as part of creating the product and then putting that product into the market. Doing all of this, involves choreographing and managing a lot of activities, so that the final…

  • Benefits of early usability testing

    You do not need an Alpha/Beta software product to do usability testing. In fact, if you wait until then to do usability testing, you have waited too long. This late, making changes based on usability feedback will be costly and time consuming and apt to break something else. The resistance…

  • Google Chrome vs. Cuil – Product Management Case Studies?

    By now, many of you are well aware of two new products that came out this summer (and if you have not, you were probably enjoying the summer a lot more than I was) – a new browser from Google called Google Chrome and a new search engine from a…

  • Saas model will collapse in two years – What?

    In a mind numbing interview with ZDnet, Lawson Software CEO Harry Debes made the prediction that Saas software model is bound to collapse in two years. Even if I try to put aside his opinion (however dumbfounded it is), what I cannot comprehend is how a CEO of a public…

  • Product Manager’s new friend – Google Forms

    I just discovered the forms functionality in Google docs. What an awesome piece of functionality that will help me a ton as a product manager. In a nutshell, it helps you create a form on the fly (think about creating a simple survey) and email it to a bunch of…

  • Differentiating in an overcrowded market

    Ever wondered if any product management is needed for commodity products such as pencils, pens, toothpaste etc. where the customer needs have not changed for years? Alain Breillat of Picture Imperfect has a great post on how to create product differentiation in an overcrowded market?. It is a fascinating read…

  • LinkedIn Answers – A goldmine for Product Managers

    If you have not been to LinkedIn Answers, you should check it out – it has a great section on product management. There is a wealth of information there on market research, pricing, product positioning and a ton of other stuff. Have a question? post it there for free and…

  • Business uses for Twitter

    I have been using twitter for maybe the last 3 months now. When I saw it for the first time in 2007, my reaction was right! who has the time for this? Then I reluctantly signed up 3 months back and now I am hooked. Many of the folks I…

  • Companies ignore social media at their own peril

    Last month, I slammed Infusionsoft when they started spamming me with email after I had downloaded an eBook from their website. The very next day, CEO of Infusionsoft Clate Mask apologized via comments to that blog post. Here was his comment: “Gopal–very fair point. We should have had the language…

  • Competition validates your existence

    Have you heard – this is a huge untapped market, we are the market leaders and we have no competition? Such a market does not exist and the above statement is nothing but a myth. If you have no competition, you are probably in  a market that does not exist.…

  • Why do salesmen lie?

    Shown below is an email I got yesterday (unsolicited I should say) from a company called SalesDiesel (this is a real company, they have a website and indeed do what they claim in this email). So why do I have an issue with this? 1) The email is addressed to…